Faculty Profiles

Cordelia Barrera (Ph.D. University of Texas San Antonio, 2009) spercializes in Latina/o literatures and the American Southwest, as well as U.S. border theory, third space feminist theory, popular culture, and film. She writes movie reviews for the borderlands journal LareDOS, and has published articles and reviews in The Quarterly Review of Film and Video and the Journal of Popular Culture. She is working on a book project that explores cyber technologies, social justice, and forms of oppositional consciousness in borderlands science fiction.

Michael Borshuk (Ph.D. Alberta, 2002) specializes in African American literature and cultural studies. He is the author of Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2006), for which he received the President's Book Award in 2008, and various essays, reviews, and encyclopedia entries on African American literature, music, and American modernism. He has co-edited two special issues on the city and urban culture for Studies in the Literary Imagination, and for ten years, from 1999 to 2009, was a regular contributor on jazz to Coda masgazine. His current book project addresses jazz, performance studies, and visual culture. He is also currently co-editing a special issue of Popular Music and Society on the work of Randy Newman, and will be a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter. In 2011, he won the President's Excellence in Teaching Award at Texas Tech.

John Samson (Ph.D. Cornell, 1980) focuses on historical and theoretical approaches to 19^th- and 20^th-century American literature. He is the author of White Lies: Melville's Narratives of Facts (Cornell UP, 1989) and articles and book chapters on American fiction, nonfiction, and criticism, in such journals as American Literature, American Quarterly, and Intertexts. For nine years he wrote the “Melville” chapter for American Literary Scholarship (Duke UP, 1995-2003). His latest publication is “The Critical Response to Herman Melville” in Critical Insights: Herman Melville, ed. Eric Link (Salem Press, 2013).

Yuan Shu (Ph.D. Indiana, 1999) is an associate professor of English and director of Asian Studies Program at Texas Tech University. His research interest includes transpacific American studies and globalization theory, technology and discourse, as well as critical and comparative race studies. He has published essays in journals varying from Cultural Critique to MELUS. He has co-edited two essay volumes, American Studies as Transnational Practice (Dartmouth College Press, 2015) and Oceanic Archives and Transpacific American Studies (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). His current project, Empire and Cosmo-politics: Technology, Race, Transpacific Chinese American Writing is under revision for a university press. He is also editing a special issue on "World Orders and Geopolitics of the Transpacific" for Verge: Studies in Global Asia's (7.1). He served as a US Fulbright scholar teaching and researching at the National University of Singapore from 2017 to 2018.

Sara L. Spurgeon (Ph.D. Arizona, 2000) works in literatures of the American West/Southwest, as well as nature/environmental writing, gender studies, and ecocritical, frontier, and postcolonial theory, and directs the graduate concentration in Literature, Social Justice, and Environment (LSJE). She is editor of the critical anthology Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road (2011), author of Exploding the Western (2005), the monograph Ana Castillo: Western Writers Series (2004), and co-author of Writing the Southwest (1995, revised 2^nd edition 2003). She has published essays in the journals Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Western American Literature, Southwestern American Literature, and Intertexts, and was 2012 President of the Western Literature Association.

Elissa Zellinger (Ph.D. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) focuses on nineteenth-century American poems, and the way these works were dynamic centers of cultural, political, and aesthetic exchange. Specifically, she combines lyrical poetry and liberal political philosophy to examine the conflation of poet and poem, specifically in nineteenth-century American women's poetry. Her book, Lyrical Strains: Liberalism and Women's Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press; November 2020) examines how poetry by women allowed writers and readers to "strain" against and thereby clarify the assumptions of liberal selfhood in the U.S. during this period. These ideas have inspired her second project, in which she explores the late nineteenth-century "profession" (in the sense of both a line of work and a declaration) of writing poetry.